If you told me Natasha Pulley was writing the phonebook, I would read it. And be impressed, but not entirely surprised, that she managed to write an achingly tender queer romance into it. And an octopus.

Granted, the usual rule of traumatized genius in need of someone to look after them + golden retriever in human form has been tweaked so that the retriever is more of a borzoi and also traumatized. 
This mostly isn't a love story. It's a story about what we do when the world is terrible—the good, the bad, the inevitable, and the necessary. One of the things that has always fascinated me about Pulley is that she's not interested in passing moral judgement on her characters, for all that her characters are interested in moral questions. Valery and Shenkov (and Mori and Kite) are all caught up in whether they are good, but Pulley isn't interested in having the text answer what it means to be good or bad when living in bad times. She's mostly interested in what it means to be human. Which is why I love these books so much.
It's a fantasy novel in the sense that this isn't (meant to be?) a story about Soviet Russia, it's a story about people in impossible circumstances. It's just that, in its own way, our collective history is so fantastical that, I mean, not to get overly Delany, but realistic fiction is just a scifi AU with very few changes made. In many ways, that's what Pulley has done here.
Also, on the representation point, Pulley is thoughtful about how she telegraphs that Valery is autistic. I'm not sure how noticeable it is to neurotypicals, but particularly the eye contact, the way that speaking in code is an explicit thing he needs to learn, and hearing the electricity - she does a good job with it. (Also the trauma of not knowing how to make friends and then assuming everyone will eventually leave you except for that one friend who is entirely ride or die because they get it's just how you are.)